The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 85laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was angry.

He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it." ^ Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements.

The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order ; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.

Thus it has come about that many persons to-day reofard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural relio;ion. He has infected them with his own love o£ comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist.

Societies are actually formed for his cult ; a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn ; ^ hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody ; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter. Whitman is often spoken of as a ^ pagan.

The w^ord nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin ; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In 1 R. M. BuCKE : Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged. ^ I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia.

p. 86neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.

" I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long ; They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth." ^ No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman ; for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt.

When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say : — " Ah, friend, thou too must die : why thus lameutest thou ? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far than thou. . . . Over me too hang death and forceful fate.

There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow from the string." ^ Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each 1 Song of Myself, 32. 2 Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation.

p. 87ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire. Instinctive good they did not reckon sin ; nor had they any such desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so many of us insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be ' good in the making,' or something equally ingenious.

Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of nature, — Walt Whitman's verse, ' What is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect,' would have been mere silliness to them, — nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent ' another and a better world ' of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods of sense would also find no place.

This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman's outpourings have not got.

His optimism is too voluntary and defiant ; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,^ and this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.

If, then, we give the name of healthy-minded ness to the\ tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are ; good, we find that we must distinguish between a more i involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy- i ^ " God is afraid of me ! " remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education in humility still rankled in his breast.